The Tears of a Clown(ette)

A blog purportedly belonging to the girlfriend of the man who left their home in America to leak classified National Security Agency documents to two major newspapers said Monday that “all [she] feels is alone.”

“For those of you that know me without my super hero cape, you can probably understand why I’ll be refraining from blog posts for a while,” reads the most recent note allegedly written by Lindsay Mills, dated June 10. “My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass.”

Mills, an acrobatic pole performer, is the girlfriend of alleged NSA leaker Edward Snowden, according to the couple’s neighbor in Hawaii.

Snowden stepped from the shadows Sunday in an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Guardian and said he was the source for a series of recent news stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post that detailed secret NSA surveillance programs – far-reaching programs he dubbed “horrifying.” Snowden told The Guardian that he had left his girlfriend in Hawaii weeks before to hide out in Hong Kong and hadn’t told her his plans.

The poetic blog apparently written by Mills under the initial “L” has several references to a companion named “E” with whom she moved to Hawaii. “E” is never named fully and in several pictures of the couple, his face is not visible.

“For those who have forgotten, I moved to Hawaii to continue my relationship with ‘E,’” one post from July 2012 says before detailing a weekend night at her new home. “The sun falling, sweat-building, and my yard growing tidier – I looked over at E and smiled. This was the most adult, boring moment I’ve ever had. I felt grown up, suburban, and oddly content… I was happy to find my romantic date in the end.”

In the same post, “L” says she remembers when she and “E” fell in love with little street festivals in Japan – right around the time Snowden told The Guardian he began work as a private contractor on a military base on the island nation.

Snowden said that before he decided to take on the NSA, he had a “very comfortable life” that included, among other things, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii.

“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” Snowden said.

In a blog post on April 15, 2013, Mills says she and ‘E’ are moving, writing, “E and I received the keys to our next abode yesterday,” and she seems excited about “a new space” and how the couple “took time to envision what each room could look like once we crammed our things in them.” Two weeks after the post was written, Snowden and Mills moved out of the Hawaiian home they had moved into in January, said a neighbor. Snowden disappeared somewhere in Hong Kong. Mills hasn’t appeared publicly since.

In the blog, Mills’ last few entries mention her feeling “alone” but it’s her post Monday – the only one after Snowden’s public confession – that she calls “Adrift.”

“Surely there will be villainous pirates, distracting mermaids, and tides of change in this new open water chapter of my journey. But at the moment all I can feel is alone,” she writes. “And for the first time in my life I feel strong enough to be on my own. Though I never imagined my hand would be so forced.”

Mills’ mother declined to comment on the relationship, only saying that this was a difficult time for the family.

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